The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962)

Original title: Baron Prásil

Landing on the moon, an astronaut (Rudolf Jelínek) is greeted by the men who came there before him: the protagonists of Verne’s “De la Terre à la Lune”, Cyrano de Bergerac, and last but not least the great Baron Münchhausen (Milos Kopecký) - as he’s called here in Germany. It’s Baron Prásil in Czechia. Because they don’t need silly science stuff like space suits, the gentlemen assume our astronaut who very much does need one, to be a proper moon man.

Münchhausen decides to take the young man under his wing and show him the wonders and adventures of Earth, which indeed he does. Once there, Münchhausen also insists on getting in a love triangle between the men and Venetian princess Bianca (Jana Brejchová), though none of the young people is actually that into him.

All of this really doesn’t describe the beauty, wonder and utterly unbridled imagination of Karel Zeman’s version of the Münchhausen material – here mostly based on Bürger and particularly Doré’s illustrations to Bürger’s narrative. Technically, this is a mixture of live action and all kinds of animation you could even imagine in 1962, at once naïve, deeply aesthetically constructed, real and unreal thanks to the many ways Zeman mixes special effects techniques and real people. The film is ever shot like a moving paean to the human imagination and filled to the brim with a sense of wonder that should make every viewer a child again for at least an evening.

The characters are of course, not surprisingly given their placement in a series of beautiful and bizarre tall tales, archetypes without normal psychological depths, but from time to time, whenever he finds space between a dozen sight gags and coming up with sights no human being has beheld before on a movie screen, Zeman does hint rather heavily that archetypes are archetypes because they have quite a bit to say about the unchanging parts of the human psyche. Just because young lovers aren’t original or deep does not mean a pure and naïve idea of love isn’t real or important.

But really, if there ever was a movie that exists just to be experienced instead of interpreted or talked to death film school style, it is this one.

Count Dracula (1971)

Original title: Hrabé Drakula

The Victorian era. Jonathan Harker (Jan Schánilec) is sent to Transylvania to finish some real estate dealings with one Count Dracula (Ilja Racek), who is acquiring a new, gloomy, home in England. Well, and if you don’t know what happens next, you might want to make your way to Project Gutenberg.

This Czechoslovakian TV movie is more than just an interesting artefact for being the only Dracula adaptation I’ve ever heard of directed by a woman, Anna Procházková. It is also a genuinely fine film that makes much out of what clearly were very limited means. Stylistically, this fluctuates between some moody and appropriately bleak locations – the castle corridor and snowy Transylvania are the greatest example here, and the director milks them for mood and impact for all they are worth – and not terribly detailed interior sets. The latter are often used during cramped closed-ups – probably to help people on the kind of TV most Czechoslovakian viewers must have had at the time to see any damn thing at all – that are still highly effective and curiously moody. It often comes as a bit of a shock when the camera gets further away from the action, and this, too, Procházková uses very well, emphasising the moments of danger and strangeness.

Squeezing Stoker’s novel into a running time of seventy-five minutes would have been impossible, so there are heavy cuts to the material – Quincy Morris goes gets the shaft as he always does, but so do Renfield and the last voyage of the Demeter – and what’s kept in of the material is often heavily compressed for time. Though, unlike many an adaptation, Procházková and co-writer Oldrich Zelezný have a great idea of which core set pieces of the novel they want to keep and why they want to keep them. It’s genuinely impressive work that manages to do the novel’s mood in its best chapters justice throughout.

Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch (1985)

aka Howling II: … Your Sister Is a Werewolf

Coming to the funeral of his sister Karen, Dee Wallace Stone’s journalist character from the first movie, Texan sheriff Ben (Reb Brown) soon finds himself in curious company. Occult investigator Stefan Crosscoe (Christopher Lee) attempts to convince Ben that his sister had arranged her own on-camera murder to prevent turning into a werewolf for good. Karen’s former colleague Jenny (Annie McEnroe, doing an awkward Jamie Lee Curtis impression) is willing to buy into Stefan’s ideas quickly enough, but Ben needs a bit of convincing.

Fortunately, werewolf attacks are a good argument against scepticism, so soon, everybody’s on board with Stefan’s tales about the mighty werewolf queen Stirba (Sybil Danning) and her plan to turn more werewolves into wolfier werewolves, or something. Anyway, she needs to be stopped right quick. Stefan invites his new allies to accompany him to the small town in Transylvania that’s closest to Stirba’s secret lair in a big ass castle nobody appears to know how to find – not even Stefan’s local allies who must have lived in its neighbourhood for decades.

Needless to say, things turn weird in Transylvania.

Where Joe Dante’s first The Howling is still one of the best werewolf films ever made, Philippe Mora’s sequel is bad in so bizarre and wilful ways, it is also pretty damn fantastic without being good or best in any way, shape or form.

Aesthetically, this attempts to mix 1985 post-punk style, bits and pieces of gothic horror and a backlot Europe that manages to feel like an off-beat dream despite the backlot for once having been in actual Europe - Czechoslovakia to be precise. In practice, this means unholy yet weirdly compelling clashes between the kind of leather outfits favoured in movie BDSM and apocalypses and the cobwebby castles which are Christopher Lee’s natural habitat. A guy wearing an absurd medieval closed helmet and little else guarding said castle with an automatic weapon is the sort of thing you can expect here in every single scene. The film is nearly Italian in this regard.

Villagers that are having a folk horror village fete (probably to give Lee Wickerman flashbacks), a little person zombie attack that echoes Don’t Look Now, and a truly off-putting werewolf orgy to the jolly sounds of the film’s new wave theme song are only part of the film’s attractions. For the sleazebags among us, there’s also an incredibly ridiculous werewolf threesome between Danning, Marsha A Hunt’s character and whoever plays the guy trying to imitate wolf sex noises with them that’ll haunt your dreams (and not in a pleasant way), suggestions that Lee is the ten thousand year old brother of the equally ancient Stirba and the two once had a bit of an incestuous thing going on between them, and general horniness whenever nobody gets killed.

Our heroes are absolute idiots without any concept of strategy or any sense of self-preservation, jollily walking into traps like the giant idiots they are. Fortunately, Stirba’s not much better at her job either. I’m not sure what Stefan did with his life before becoming an occult investigator, or what his qualifications for the role are, apart from his knowledge about the movie’s curious werewolf subspecies that can only be killed by titanium instead of silver. But then, I’m not sure why our werewolf matriarch mostly spends her time having sex, shooting lasers and casting spells instead of doing anything werewolf-y, nor why there’s quite as much staking of werewolves going on here. Yes, titanium stakes, of course. Those are even more phallic, probably.

I am unsure if Mora is in on any of this being as funny, absurd and weird as it plays out, but then, that’s a not an uncommon reaction to Mora’s films for me. On the one hand, if he’s in on the joke, he keeps the straightest directorial face possible, on the other hand, how could anyone not be? The only point in the movie where I’m sure someone involved in the production is consciously taking the piss is in the ending credits, when Danning’s “iconic” moment of ripping her top off is repeated seventeen (of course people, including me, have counted it) times, intercut with outtakes from the movie one can only read as reaction shots to Danning’s breasts. Christopher Lee seems to approve of them.

The rest of the movie, I have no idea. What I do know is that Howling II is the perfect portrayal of the dream life of some male 80s teenager who also happens to be a fan of pulp writing.

The Fantastic Planet (1973)

Original title: Le Planète Sauvage

Somewhere, some time, a race of blue giants called the Traags live curious lives of psychic, machine-based learning and pretty psychedelic looking meditations. The latter seem to take up most of their time. Still, these people are down to Earth (or Ygam, in their case) enough to hold pets. Namely, what they call the Oms (a really subtle play on the French word “homme”, of course), little hairless monkey creatures they took on an expedition to a planet you might have heard of called Terra that seems to have become somewhat post-apocalyptic, the film suggests. The tale is narrated by the grown-up version of a little Om boy whose “owner”, the young daughter of a leader of the Traags, gave him the name “Terr”. Through happenstance, Terr gains access to the same psychic teaching material used to educate his owner, so he learns to speak and understand rather a lot about the peculiar world he finds himself in. Both will be very useful skills once a grown-up Terr flees into the wilds where small clans of escaped and free-born humans live and try to avoid the Traags’ regular attempts at exterminating what they only see as animal pests.

Eventually, Terr will become a catalyst in bringing changes to the relationship between the two races.

As a rule, I am not much of a fan of fantastic cinema – nor literature, for that matter – that trades heavily in the allegorical, even if, like in the case of French director René Laloux’s film here, I’m perfectly fine with the politics being allegorized. I’ve never quite understood why you’d use an allegory this obvious when you could simply straight-up say what you mean. There’s a strange thing about the simple and obvious allegory here, however, for if you read half a dozen pieces about the film, you’ll find half a dozen different readings of what the allegory actually means, from racism (which seems to me the clear and obvious reading), to animal rights, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (which happened right when this was animated there, and drew out the production for years), or, if you’re Gene Siskel (together with his buddy Ebert always there for the most clueless view of any given genre movie), druggy nonsense. All of which might suggest something about the subjectivity of interpretation, even of the obvious.

Be it as it may, one of the virtues of Laloux’s film is its complete lack of a moralizing tone even while it tells a moral story. The plot itself – the script was written by Laloux with the great writer Roland Topor and is based on a novel by Stefan Wul – is about as simple and matter of fact as things go. This stands in grand contrast to Fantastic Planet’s biggest selling point for someone of my tastes: aesthetics where nothing looks straight, or straightforward, or seems to belong to the world a viewer might simply understand. The visual imagination on display maybe does owe a little to the drug trippyness of its production time, but rather more to surrealism and European traditions of non-naturalistic art. The diverging Czech and French approaches to the surrealist and the strange come together rather wonderfully into scenes that are at times alien, funny, grotesque, just plain weird, and always a little bit mind-blowing, really giving the whole thing the air of a tale neither taking place on the shores we know nor told there, adding the quality of watching a myth from a very different and strange place. This gives Fantastic Planet a particularly curious quality: of being absolutely of its time in its ideas about the world and how to present it and its general ideas about life, yet also so strangely situated in a place that never actually existed that it becomes something singular.

Krabat: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1978)

Original title: Carodejuv ucen

Lusatia in the late 17th or early 18th Century. Krabat is an orphan, roaming the countryside, getting by rather badly. One day around Christmas time, talking ravens lure Krabat to the Black River Mill. The mill's one-eyed master - who just happens to speak with the same voice as the one-eyed leader of the ravens - takes the boy into his service as an apprentice. The master keeps Krabat and his eleven other apprentices as virtual prisoners.

That might be because, as Krabat soon enough learns, the master is not really teaching his apprentices how to be millers, but how to work black magic, especially how to transform into animals. Once a year, the master challenges the best of his apprentices to a duel, for there can only be one master in the mill. The duel's conclusion, however, is always foregone because the master keeps his grimoire and with it the greatest magical powers to himself, giving the whole affair the air of a particularly cruel ritual. Attempts to escape are always thwarted by the master's superior magical powers and punished with imaginative cruelty.

One day around Holy Saturday, when the apprentices are allowed to leave the mill to spend a night at a place where someone died a violent death, Krabat sees and falls in love with a beautiful singing girl. This love will change the course of Krabat's fate, for love may turn out to be stronger than the forces of magic.

Krabat is based on the book by German Otfried Preußler, who is still a widely read author of the sort of children's books that give a certain type of conservative conniptions, what with them often including elements of the fantastic and not always painting witches, nor sorcerers in the worst light, and actually acknowledging the less pleasant sides of life. I'd not be surprised if the early contact with Preußler's often folkloristically inspired books - Krabat's story is based on a very specific folk tale - were in part responsible for my taste for the macabre and the weird in literature. But I digress.

This Czech (with some financial help from German TV) animated version of Preußler's tale was directed by the great Karel Zeman, an animation pioneer and owner of a wholly personal style of filmmaking whose earlier works - among it some breathtaking adaptations/homages to Jules Verne and a singular version of the Baron Münchhausen tales - often mixed real-life actors and his splendid cutout animation technique.

Krabat does not include live action elements (well, except some water and smoke), but has the look and feel of old woodcuts come to life, with the shadow of one of Zeman's great artistic idols, Gustav Doré, not far. This form is ideal for a story that is in turns simple, naive (though there is still the same fable about the lures and horrors of power and how to escape them at its core as in Preußler's book) and optimistic, as well as gruesome and macabre in some of the things it shows, and even more so in those things it implies, because it makes it easy for Zeman to change Krabat's mood at a moment's notice. Moments of quiet charm and peace, moments of pure imagination and moments of the grotesque are transitioning into each other, suggesting that the film shares the world view of the folktale its based on twice removed; things horrifying and things evil are as much parts of the human experience as are love and laughter, though the latter just may be what makes us human more than the former.

One particular accomplishment of Zeman's film (and something Zeman always was particularly good at) is how it manages to filter the director's own imagination through the lens of a rural late 17th century worldview without ever making the impression of one part of the film's philosophy overwhelming the other; it's all Zeman, yet it's also all Krabat.

Technorati-Markierungen: czechoslovakian movies,german movies,reviews,fantasy,animation,horror,karel zeman

Krakatit (1949)

An anonymous man whom we will come to know in his fever dreams as the chemic Prokop (Karel Höger), is found ill and delirious on the streets of Prague. While the doctors are trying to save him, the audience becomes witness to what at first seem to be his memories, but what later on can only be read as the feverish way of Prokop's subconscious to ponder what his invention of a horrifyingly powerful (the film makes heavy atom bomb insinuations the novel it is based on couldn't have made) explosive he dubbed "Krakatit" (after the volcano, you see) means to the world and him.

In his fever dreams, Prokop will find himself feverish, frequently losing parts of his memory and doubting his sense of reality. He will be betrayed by a former colleague, have a bucolic interlude that sees him breaking a girl's heart because he clearly prefers less innocent companions, get into the hand of a foreign industrial power who wants to reinstate monarchy, exchange explosion metaphors with a femme fatale princess (Florence Marly), get roped into a capitalist conspiracy, and destroy large parts of the world.

I don't know much about Czech and Czechoslovakian film history, but I do know that Krakatit's director Otakar Vávra is quite a problematic case as the sort of opportunistic survivor character who'd take on the mantle of any ideology, and lick the appropriate boot to get his film's financed; Nazis, communists, he just didn't seem to care.

Of course, bad (depending on one's definition of "bad", of course) people can still make good art, and it's impossible for me to watch Krakatit (based on a novel by Karel Capek, who is an important figure in a type of early SF that always bordered on the Weird) and not call it good art, Vávra having licked Goebbels' s boots or not. Ideologically, the film makes it easy enough for a Western leftist (or pinko communist, for you American readers) like me to not get too annoyed with it. In Krakatit, the upper classes, rich people and especially so-called nobility are generally bad, building weapons that can destroy the world is not a good idea, and scientists should work to improve the life of humanity instead. It's not exactly the most complex view of the world, but it's also one I find difficult to disagree with very much as it is presented here; at the very least, it's far easier to stomach than Leni Riefenstahl glorifying the NSDAP or D.W. Griffith telling us how awesome the Ku Klux Klan is.

But really, it's not so much the film's ideology, nor its ideas about the responsibility of science that make Krakatit worth watching, but rather the film's visual power. Vávra has obviously drunk from the same well as the American film noir, transforming expressionist techniques into a thing of his own, letting shadows and abstract and consciously artificial framing choices become metaphors for its main character's state of mind. Unlike most American films of this style, Krakatit does explicitly position much of what happens in it as fever visions instead of just being feverishly, a-realistically intense. It's never clear how much, if anything, of what Prokop dreams has actually happened, and what is only metaphors and symbols for his fears, what expressions of a guilty and doubtful conscience. There is also a strong sexual undertone to everything in the film, be it explosions - all these eruptions clearly have something very sexual for Prokop - or Prokop just looking at women.

For the most part, Vávra handles this aspect of his movie very well, slowly easing his audience into the dream narrative with a comparatively naturalistic beginning that turns more and more symbolic and unreal the longer the film goes on, with plot elements that could be used as straight forward pulp adventure (there's the evil foreign - clearly German - power, two femme fatales Prokop has conflicted and largely unhealthy feelings for, explosions, a conspiracy of rich people) turned into something at once even more heated than pulp usually becomes, and more symbolic.

In its effect, Krakatit works splendidly as the metaphorical fever dream it is supposed to be, melodramatic, difficult and energetic like a serial that has taken a wrong turn some time before it could introduce a mad gorilla.

Technorati-Markierungen: czechoslovakian movies,reviews,sf,thriller,otakar vávra,karel höger,florence marly

Three Films Make A Post: Brace yourself for the ultimate transplant. The human soul.

The Devil's Tomb (2009): Take one bit of military horror, a spoonful of Event Horizon (but none of that film's glorious production design), a chattier version of the demons from Demoni, lots of running through corridors and a wasted Ron Perlman, shake, stir, add a bit of pus and gore and about two scenes that actually work as they are supposed to, and let cook until the plot becomes increasingly stupid but mildly entertaining in its wilful stupidity. One Jason Connery movie with extra cheese, coming right up.

Viva Riva! (2010): In a sense, the core of this Congolese gangster film is just as derivative as that of The Devil's Tomb, but transplanting the tropes of neo noir into the contemporary Congo produces changes in these tropes that shift one's perspective on them. This aspect of the movie is further improved by the fact that director Djo Tunda wa Munga just loves to give most of his characters hidden depths that are revealed in sometimes painful, sometimes enlightening ways and which keep most of the people on screen here away from just fulfilling their genre roles as written.

This isn't meant to say Viva Riva! doesn't work as a genre film. In fact, its slickly filmed mix of effective hyperrealism, a bit of the old ultra-violence and a sense of humour whose bitterness can become quite cutting with a twisty plot that actually works is pretty riveting. It's just nice to find these virtues paired with intelligence, playfulness, and the type of humanism that can't really believe in happy endings anymore.

The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians aka Tajemstvi hradu v Karpatech (1981 or 1983):

This film's director Oldrich Lipský is beloved by Czech language viewers for a series of more or less bizarre comedies that mix the corny with the grotesque and the surreal.

This example of Lipský's improbable art is based on one of Jules Verne's lesser novels, and uses this source material for a loving parody of adventure novel and gothic romance tropes that has just as much fun with its parodic elements as it has with showing off the grotesque inventions of its mad scientist (there's always a mad scientist). These inventions have a sort of proto-steampunk aesthetic, fusing the industrial with the weirdly aesthetic. Here - of course! - listening devices are shaped like ears and a scientist has replaced his hand with an excellent, brass-gleaming multi-tool.

If the film weren't told in the tone of a farce, it would actually be a macabre story about two men who can't cope with the death of a beloved woman and do immoral things to keep her with them in what has clear hints of necrophilia; as it stands, it's a very funny film that contains mad science, death, destruction and (in good Vernesian tradition) many a funny beard.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,congolese movies,czechoslovakian movies,jason connery,ron perlman,djo tunda wa munga,oldrich lipský,horror,comedy,crime,in short

On WTF: Krysar (1986)

aka The Pied Piper of Hamlin

It's a sad fact about the state of affairs on this blog and my guest stints on WTF-Film that I've never mentioned a Czechoslovakian puppet animation film even in passing before.

Fortunately, Jiri Barta's Krysar changes that state of affairs by virtue of being too creepy to pass by. It also affords me an opportunity to go on a little rant about allegories.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: czechoslovakian movies,animation,fantasy,horror,jiri barta,reviews,other places